Before you read this understand something. I'm an old man and though its commonly held that this disease called age would have left me with an abundance of patience it has done just the opposite. It has left me with a renewed sense of urgency of the sort that fades from a man after his second century. So, since I'm writing this by hand because I'm not willing to get a data port installed in my head in my last few days, I'm going to tell you the story in brief.
My story starts in the twenty first century on Earth. Some of you don't give a damn about MY story, skip ahead then, but I'm including this all the same. An old man is entitled to his reminiscings. I was born in the mid 21st on Earth on an island in the Atlantic called Britain. The idea of "Britain" the political entity had become outdated before I was born. It was just another piece of land in the holdings of the Atlantic Federation.
A little background first. The early 21st century balkanization of the Americas and Europe was not an irriversible process. I don't remember who began consolidating first, none of that history survived the empires that resulted from consolidation. The fragmenting powers of the world decided that their only hope for staying strong was to unite with their allies. So, the world divided into four camps.
The Atlantic Federation
The State of my birth. England, Germany, Holland, Belgium, Brazil and Argentina were politically dissolved into a larger whole capable of wielding much more influence on the troubled world around them.
The Alliance
Canada, Russia, the United States, the Empire of Taiwan, Korea, Japan, Australia, and Mexico.
The Coalition
The Coalition was the last to form. I remember their franchise negotiations were still going on during my childhood. China, India, Pakistan, France, Italy, Turkey, Egypt, Chile, and New Zealand.
I almost forgot the fourth group. The non-aligned. There was a reason they either refused to join, or weren't invited into the other groups. This was the time of the fuel crisis. People had been too shortsighted or to poor to do anything about the dwindling fossil fuel reserves. No alternative power sources, solar power satellites...nothing. Well, all at once the crisis was on them. The wealthy parts of the world, mostly those nations listed above, possessed the infrastructure, finances, and expertise necessary to convert their entire society from one power source to another. The U.S. had the easiest time of the late actors. Her citizens had built, and then refused to operate, a whole grid of nuclear reactors in the 20th century.
Disaster wasn't limited to Africa. The poor regions of South East Asia suffered a similar, though less destructive, disaster. The middle east had supported itself for a century on the proceeds of oil exports. The oil was gone and they discovered they couldn't afford civilization without it. There is very little in the way of resources in the middle east and they had built their cities and palaces by trading exports for imports. Within a decade the middle east was dominated by nomadic herders once again.
Dolphins
Before I get into the Totalitarian Era I've got to backtrack to a happier memory. I love dolphins. Never seen one? Not surprised, theres only one left in all the universe, but he's had himself cloned a thousand times and researchers are working on techniques to force diversify his genetics so that dolphins can be introduced into the oceans here on New Canaan. Anyhow, I was born just a few years after dolphins learned to think. They always had the brain power, but had never developed the systematic, rational language needed for rational thought and true sentience. We, humankind, gave it to them.
They created a language. They measured the range of sound which dolphins can hear and reproduce and then discovered the intervals of frequency they are capable of distinguishing. Then they assigned different frequencies different letters that dolphins could actually pronounce themselves. That had been the problem with earlier attempts, they had tried to use a language unspeakable by the test subject, like trying to teach a man with no hands sign language. It was decided English was too complex a language to try to inductively teach this species as their first language.
The researchers became fluent in an old created language named Esperanto. Esperanto was designed to be an extremely logical, simple, easy to learn language. They took dolphins in captivity and paired them. Researchers would sit at the edges of the tanks and simply type words and sentences into their computers. The computers would convert the typed letters into the corresponding frequencies for dolphins and be played in the pool by underwater speakers. They immersed the adult dolphins in language but they never learned more than a few words. Things changed when the pairs began giving birth. The young ones learned as the language centers of their brains developed, just like a human baby. The experiment continued for a few generations and the dolphins themselves expanded their new language. Humans couldn't understand them by ear alone so the research teams developed Dolphin to human translators too.
Well, eventually it was decided that they couldn't keep these dolphins caged anymore, they even won civil rights in several countries and tuna companies faced a brutal series of lawsuits. The speaking dolphins were released into the carribean and something unexpected happened over the next few decades. Some released dolphins formed their own little hunting/gathering groups and some joined non-speakers. They all had one thing in common though, all of their offspring were taught the language. It turned out the thinking/speaking dolphins had a higher survival rate than the mute sort. In twenty years, to the astonishment of the old research team, nearly every dolphin in the carribean spoke and shark populations had dwindled to the edge of extinction.
I remember dolphins on Europa. I had moved outward into the belt and during a military exercise I was taken beneath the kilometers thick ice to look at the deepest oceans in the solar system. From the windowed compartment I could see lit shapes in the dark, darting around beneath the enormous superstructure of fusion power plants. They were dolphins, encased in HOT suits, their transparent layers were filled with phosphorescent algae and they glowed like alien angels as they shot about in the low-g waters. I remember how they played in front of the window, flashing me their permanent smiles before flitting off into the darkness.
The Africa Problem
The fall of Africa is particularly sharp in my memory. I was there. When I came of age I joined the Atlantic Federation military. True population pressure was beginning about this time and the increasingly controlling governments began to funnel large percentages of their population into a tremendous military industrial complex that was already reaching out toward Luna, Mars and the asteroid belt. So I joined the Federation Marines and excelled. I was fit and healthy and driven. I was asked to volunteer for a special outfit. I volunteered. We volunteers were trained into mobile assault battalions and one day they just up and dropped us into Berlin. We were to fight what we were to become, enhanced soldiers. They smashed us. They were genetically and cybernetically enhanced troops and they destroyed us. I remember hiding in the upper floors of a parking structure and covering the battle on the streets below and hearing one of them coming up behind me. I surprised him, shot him point blank in the chest with a training grenade. The little lasers painted me as well as him. It earned me some respect from my superiors and it started my chain of promotions. Those sort of situations are what make the difference between general and corporal; just one little grenade.
Two years later I was riding in a transport EMV that was barrelling over the mediterranean toward the North African coast wondering if the world was about to end. I think it damn near must have. We were skirting low over the ocean when I was nearly blinded by the light that flared up in front of the EMV's windscreen. Alliance kill-sats started stabbing beams of light and electromagnetically accelerated ions, and anything else they had up there, down at us. My transport made it and my squad got the hell away from our staging area fast. We made it to one of those old burnt out African cities as fast as our feet could carry us.
Heres how things played out. While we were tromping around in the desert ambushing the numerically superior (but enhancement lacking) Alliance force, the Commanders of all three empires (read dictators or Totalitarian councils, we never really knew for sure) worked out a deal. Africa became untouchable. The alternative was an all or nothing war that might topple civilization, so everybody decided to pull off the continent and never come back.
I was deeply affected by my stay. I remember sleeping in rubble in one of the old cities and watching children play in complete filth. I'll never forget this one particular little girl and the doll she'd made out of trash.